Cyborg 2 is Angelina Jolie’s first adult role: I picked it up to see where she started out as an actress. I wanted to see if Tomb Raider, her 20th movie, was any better than her second. I also wanted to see if her lips were always that big. (Yes, her lips were always that big, although she seems to have gained considerable weight in the bust region.) And no, Tomb Raider isn’t much better. In fact, it’s significantly worse.

When I reviewed The Mummy Returns, I pointed out that many sequels are better than the original movie. Cyborg 2 is another example of this. My primary complaint about Cyborg was that its pace was slow enough to make Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Director’s Cut) look like a rollercoaster of excitement. What I’m trying to say is Cyborg made 2001 look like Speed, ok? I could go on like this, but I probably shouldn’t.

Someone’s goosed Laura Croft.

Cyborg 2, however, is much snappier. Angelina Jolie plays the cyborg Casella “Cash” Reese. She shows a lot more range of emotion in this film than she did in Tomb Raider, and immeasurably more talent than Jean Claude Van Dame did in the original Cyborg. Her partner in this film, Colson “Colt” Ricks (played by Elias Koteas), is a rubber-faced thug who is more interested in self-preservation than kicking people’s asses. Watching him go wild-eyed in panicked amazement at the plot twists is half the fun of the movie.

Here, Jolie samples Koteas’s blood. “Billy Bob’s is much sweeter,” she says.

The other half of the movie belongs to Danny Bench (Billy Drago). Bench is hired by the cybernetics firm that built Casella to pursue Casella and Colt. Drago’s character is not all that different from John Bly, the character he played on TV’s The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. In fact, he even dresses the same. Drago plays the role of psychopathic assassin much better than Vincent Kiln did as Fender in Cyborg. Kiln relied on his cool-dude glasses to convey his evilness. Drago uses his eyes.

Oh. There’s also Jack Palance. He plays Jack Palance. Actually, he plays a pair of lips on a TV screen most of the time, but it’s still Jack Palance. Jack Palance alone is enough to raise the class level of Cyborg 2 to at least B-Movie level.

Get me out of this blue filter. This isn’t Battlefield Earth!

The biggest weakness of the movie is the story, which never comes together. The original plot is that Cash is a bomb targeted to kill the board of directors of Pinwheel Corps. biggest competitors, but it eventually — and implausibly — becomes a personal vendetta thing. All sorts of sub-plots are hinted at but never completely developed. The result is a somewhat confusing muddle in the middle of the film, which is then quickly abandoned in favor of Cash and Colt beating more people up.

The movie is fast-paced and fun to watch thanks to Palance, Jolie, Koteas, and Drago. Everything else could probably be replaced — or just edited out. Unfortunately, it looks as though they did it the other way around for Cyborg 3 – none of these people make a return in that film, and preliminary reports from the IMDB reviews don’t look that good.

You lost your watch where?